Category: Words

The Real Willy Wonka

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by Blaire Baron

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It is still dark and the early morning cacophony has yet to greet the day. The others have already left and Washington knows they aren’t waiting for him, not this time. With no Mum to wake him, he’s getting better at finding his clothes in the dark. Washington scoops up a sticky ball of yesterday’s ugali and pops it in his mouth before rushing out of the ramshackle maze. He zig-zags past sleeping mothers and babes. Everything here is laid bare, there are no doors and there’s nothing here to steal.

Some might call it a labor camp but to Washington, it’s home. Out of the maze now, he runs toward the line of humming shadows holding machetes. Washington grins up at one of his uncles.

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LA Live

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by Ebony Haywood

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After sunset— after parking meters doze to sleep, after attorneys in starched suits snap their suitcases shut, after happy hour at City Tavern and rush hour traffic on Broadway, after tired fathers in high-rise condos feed, bathe, and tuck their children into bed— there is energy: emerging from the warm concrete to electrify the air across Figueroa, Wilshire, and Olympic, the heart of Downtown Los Angeles. I feel this energy pulsing through the lights of The Staples Center, swarming with Kings Hockey fans donning oversized black and white jerseys. Outside the Regal Movie Theater, men in their blue jeans and women in their high heels, looking awkward, await their dates. I see their eyes brighten and then avert with acute embarrassment from the gazes of passersby who don’t wave and smile back.

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Quote of the Week, #15

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I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you. …

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? …

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. …

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

– Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (as found in the book Sister Outsider)